Predatory science journals pivot to video

Predatory science publishers, the wolves of the research world, are dressing themselves in a fancier quality of sheep’s clothing: Online videos.

These fake journals are common academic scams, taking money to publish anything that scientists write without asking questions about accuracy.

Publishing in these provides back-alley career advancement for researchers who must publish their work in order to get tenure or promotion, but who are turned down by real journals with strict standards.

Now these cash-for-easy-publication journals are adding video, which tends to be of low quality. It represents a new revenue stream for them, with fees ranging from $1,500 to $4,200 to post a video, as opposed to a few hundred for a written document.

We had to give the new trend a test to show whether such journals will still publish anything for a buck, but in video form.

And our ridiculous and unscientific video submission on how evolution sometimes runs backwards, producing defective species such as Florida Man, has been accepted by the Journal of Clinical and Molecular Medicine, American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research, and International Journal of Cell Science & Molecular Biology. (One of these has already posted the video; the others want payment up front.)

A fourth journal says it is “optimistic” about our work and is discussing its publishing fees. Two more are considering, despite the fact that even our submission’s title alone is nonsensical and should disqualify the video on the spot.

The short video features a man identified as Dr. Yosemite Sam waving a bottle of coloured water and showing graphs lifted at random from the Internet. We aren’t sure what the graphs show, but they looked colourful.

Medical professor Roger Pierson assures us that we submitted “complete garbage,” which was the intention. Yet this will be published if we pay up, adding to the growing mountain of worthless studies in some 10,000 fake journals that undermine the integrity of scientific literature globally and allow unqualified people to get jobs and promotions.

Pierson, from the University of Saskatchewan, says a trend to using video is already established in genuine scientific literature, and especially at conferences. Now the predatory journals are following suit.

And the scam journals have a second new tactic. They have always been easy to recognize because they skip a crucial step in science publishing, called peer review. This involves sending all reports submitted by scientists out to an independent expert who evaluates their quality, to decide whether they are worth publishing.

Predatory journals didn’t do this. They just published anything for money.

Until now. In recent months, some of the predators have started actually sending manuscripts out to academics. But the catch is that no matter what the reviewer tells them, they just publish as usual.

Pierson has spotted this trend too. He has been warning younger colleagues about fake science publishers for years.

“I’ve had several requests to review from journals I couldn’t identify,” he said in an email.

He called the new practice “a ploy to be able to show critics that there is an actual review.”

Even this newspaper has received requests to referee papers submitted to déclassé journals. And while we have turned them all down, the papers are always published anyway.

Appearances have changed for the predators, but they are still con artists at heart.

Two of the journals involved with this newspaper’s video submission have also accepted Dr. Yosemite Sam as an editor, and one of them advertises online that Sam is from Yale University — a claim we never made. (We put him in rural New Mexico.) As an editor, he gets a $300 discount.

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